Exploring Server Component States

As described in a previous article, an Exchange 2013 server can be placed into a sort of maintenance mode, not only by temporarily pausing a DAG node from the cluster, but also by putting Exchange components on that server into an inactive state using the Set-ServerComponentState cmdlet.

The most obvious reason why a component is in an inactive state is because someone put it into that state as part of a maintenance task. However, there can be several other reasons why a component is inactive. The most common reason is when the Health Management service (part of Managed Availability) has taken a component offline because it was deemed unhealthy.

The tricky part comes when one or more "requesters” have put a component into an Inactive state which might lead to confusing situations. There are 5 requesters that can switch the state of a component:

HealthAPI

Maintenance

Sidelined

Functional

Deployment

Consider the following scenario. As part of the upgrade to the latest CU, you decide to put a server into maintenance mode using the Set-ServerComponentState cmdlet. After the upgrade, you take the server back “online” by changing the state of the component back to “Active”. However, when running the Get-ServerComponentState cmdlet, you notice that one or more components are still inactive… You investigate the issue and it turned out that the component was already in an inactive state before YOU put it in an inactive state. So why didn’t the state change AFTER you put it into an active state again?

The answer is pretty simple. As you know, only the requester that has put a component into a certain state, can put it back into an active state. So, as part of your maintenance task, you’ve put a component into maintenance using “Maintenance” as the requester, you are actually flagging the service inactive for a second time.

In fact, every time someone (or something) makes a component inactive, an entry gets added to the local server’s registry in the following location:

this image displays the different entries for the FrontEndTransport component in the local Exchange server’s registry

Each entry includes the following information, separate by a colon: [Unknown Value]:[State]:[TimeStamp] By looking at the picture, you can see that the requester “Maintenance” has put this component into an active state on the given timestamp. FYI, the timestamp is saved in a binary format.

Now consider the following image:

As you can see, the component has multiple entries. Luckily, all of them are showing that the component is Active. However, if one of the entries would show the component was inactive, it would effectively be inactive. Even if a more recent entry would place that component into an active state, it would remain inactive until the same requester switches it back to active.

Why is that, you might wonder. Simply because there are cases where you don’t want someone to override the component state set by someone or something else. This could be the case when someone placed a server into maintenance mode (requester = Maintenance) and while the server is in maintenance, someone updates the Exchange server to the latest version. Exchange setup will actually place all components into an inactive state prior to starting the upgrade (requester = Deployment) and switch them back after the upgrade completes. If this action would override the component state set by “Maintenance”, the server would effectively become operational again. Something you might not want in this case.

Script to query Component States

The output of the Get-ServerComponentState cmdlet does not show who placed a component into an inactive state, nor shows it if there’s more than one entry for that component. Of course, you could each time have a look in the local server’s registry. For convenience reasons, I put together a little script that will query the local registry and output the information on-screen:

Below you’ll find the code for the script. All you need to do is save it as a .ps1 file and run it from the Exchange Server that you want to query. Alternatively, you can download the script from here.

The current version of the script is a bit rough, but it works 🙂 In a future version, I’ll try to add remoting and clean up the code a bit by adding comments…